Quotes About Communication

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense.

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?

I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!

I don't talk things, sir,' said Faber. 'I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive.

I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it?

Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.

Those women like to see their tongues dance.

In the silence, our stage whisper might carry.

And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people's heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.

The form does not matter. Content is everything.

Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!

Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls, because they are screaming at me. I can't talk to my wife, because she listens to the walls.

And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

For your file...in case you decide to be angry with me.

You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off. You never stop to think what I've asked you.

A woman's voice answered, Hello? Walter cried back at her, Hello, oh Lord, hello! This is a recording, recited the woman's voice. Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message on the wire spool so she may call you when she returns? Hello? This is a recording. Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message - He hung up. He sat with his mouth twitching. On second thought he redialed that number. When Miss Helen Arasumian comes home, he said, tell her to go to hell.

Well, I've kept you waiting long enough, he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself.

Mildred driving a hundred miles an hour across town, he shouting at her and she shouting back and both trying to hear what was said, but hearing only the scream of the car. At least keep it down to the minimum! he yelled. What? she cried. Keep it down to fifty-five, the minimum he shouted. The what? she shrieked. Speed! he shouted. And she pushed it up to one hundred and five miles and tore the breath from his mouth.

How's Uncle Louis today? Who? And Aunt Maude?

when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words.